Picture this: evil North Koreans everywhere. They're certainly not friendly, and heck, you don't speak Korean anyway. These guys have got weapons like you've never seen. How do you get out? Can they be reasoned with? Of course not.

But wait: Out of the fray emerges our hero. As well dressed as he is tough, he knocks off the bad guys with a cool composition that looks a little shaken, but not stirred. You think the evil-doers have got gadgets? C'mon, you know better. Give our hero a little crescendo of slick music, 'cause the Freedom Fighter of the Western World is getting his groove on.

Zap! Pow! Who is this man?

And what is this, "Evening News"?

Movies, murder, war, news, entertainment: It all just kind of blends together. Like some sort of stew a relative made for the holidays (don't question, just eat it). Isn't that nice?

We've got a problem in America. We all know it by name: violence. But like anything else that's commonplace in our lives, we become numb to it. We accept it. We internalize it in our culture. And what's worse, we begin to blend fiction with reality. At some point along the way, it all becomes entertainment. How many of us still know the difference? In this new age of terror and war, we should consider what new implications this old question has.

Let's back up a moment. Remember Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera? Don't sweat it, not many people do. But Ms. Rivera made the national news this year. While we may not remember her, we all remember the story.

Ms. Rivera, a Washington, D.C., mother with a 3-year-old girl, was cleaning up Cheerios in her minivan late last fall, when a bullet slammed into her back. She was gunned down in broad daylight, another victim of the "Beltway sniper." In the weeks surrounding her murder, the hunt for suspects captivated the nation. Can you name any of the other victims?

In this culture, it's John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo who we remember, of course. We -- including me -- are mesmerized by the erotic violence these quasi-super-villains personify. While Ms. Rivera and her fellow victims are dead and forgotten, those who deserve no recognition at all have earned their places in history, forever to be remembered with the sort of notoriety afforded the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, etc. In their infamy, they are glamorous. They are exciting. They sell stories. We buy them.

A few nights ago, I turned on MSNBC and was bombarded with advertisements for a new feature it was running. Dubbed "Wargame: Iraq," the program was a dramatization of the way a National Security Council meeting might advise the president. As dramatic music rumbled from my television, I watched scenes of about 10 people banter gloomily in a room cast with dark shadows. The camera zoomed in on the mock-Secretary of Defense's impassioned face as he declared: "Within a month, six weeks, we can have in the Gulf what we would need to move."

Pretty exciting. Is there a mock-Agent Mulder in the house?

There's such a thing as violence for art's sake, but this is obscene. By appealing to people's desire to be entertained, programs like this blatantly blur the line between entertainment and war. The more and more that line is smudged out, the deeper fictional violence seeps into reality.

Slowly but surely, it becomes harder for average Americans to tell the difference. Bond villains, the D.C. sniper, Saddam Hussein: they're all just "evil-doers." And with no draft in effect, war seems like little more than a television show or a video game.

Imagine a different fiction for a moment. Imagine there were a draft.

Imagine you, personally, had to lay down your life today for war. Imagine the public outcry. Imagine your own draft card. Do you, in your imagination, see a more or less turbulent vision than the experience of Vietnam?

But there is no draft; this is a television war, complete with commercial breaks. You may protest that you can tell the difference between entertainment and reality, but can you speak for everyone?

How different do Bond movies and "Wargame: Iraq" seem to the developing mind of the average 13-year-old? We've become so accustomed to violent media that we can't see the forest from the trees. We see our troops in the magazines, we peruse the newspaper and we watch the movies, all in the same day we do our holiday shopping. We turn on the news in the evenings, and our president tells us he's getting the bad guys.

Don't worry, he assures us: "When I was a kid, I remember that they used to put out there in the Old West a wanted poster. It said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

Bush is on the case. George Bush.